This is the first time Arreguín chose salmon as a subject. He was inspired by his friend Raymond Carver, the short-story writer and poet who had fallen ill. One day Arreguín picked him up from the hospital and Carver said, "I wish I was fishing." He gave this painting to Carver and the poet Tess Gallagher as a wedding gift.

The marvel of Arreguín’s artwork is how his brushstrokes straddle the actual world with a wondrous fantastical one.

“I just start painting and things happen,” says Arreguín, 81, who paints daily from a basement studio at his Seattle home. He’s been creating pattern painting since 1969, an artistic signature that can be traced back to his interest in the baroque architecture and the patterned floor tiles found in the churches of his native Mexico.

Arreguín’s canvases, the poet Tess Gallagher has written, “carry a dynamic implosion of life.” The marvel of Arreguín’s artwork is how his brushstrokes straddle the actual world with a wondrous fantastical one. The flora and fauna of a jungle, for example. Or, the Amazonian rainforest.

But as a Pacific Northwesterner for some 60 years, this region’s scenic beauty has unequivocally imprinted itself on his imagination.

“How could nature be ignored?” he asks. “How could it not be part of the menu of your mind?”

"Shilshole," 1986
60 x 84"
Private collection

Painting by Alfredo Arreguín

Alfredo Arreguín with a painting in his studio.

Photo by Susan R. Lytle

Here, then, is a sliver from the artist’s massive tome of work that has been heralded by the Smithsonian, the state of Washington and the government of Mexico.

As we envisioned this issue of Ampersand, nothing seemed more suitable in rousing us from the lethargy of winter and heralding spring than these enchanted images by Alfredo Arreguín.

Alfredo Arreguín

Alfredo Arreguín, born in Michoacán,Mexico, has been living in Seattle for nearly 60 years. His paintings are part of the permanent collections of both the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery.

Related Perspectives — Ampersand

Ampersand celebrates people and place in the Pacific Northwest. It explores the scientific and the quirky found in our natural and built environments. It highlights the art, ideas and stories that elevate our region.

Ampersand is dedicated to the curious and the creative, to the thinkers and the doers, and to all those who love this maddeningly beautiful place we call home.

Spring is a noisy time in the Northwest. Marshes reverberate with the croak of frogs. The woods fill with the twitter of birds. Even the forest floor seems to hum with the white splashes of flowers. After months of long nights and gray days, Nature greets the sun with a shout. Come along for a brief sampling of spring awakenings, both loud and quiet.

What to make of a defiant man who was arrested more than 50 times during his younger years and accused by our state of a crime that he fought all the way to the United States Supreme Court on the principle that it was, in fact, no crime at all? Who battled for much of his life, was cursed at by state and federal officials and reveled in being a living example of civil disobedience—all to make the larger point that cooperation was the key to our survival?

Bertha went “clunk” and the people involved in building Seattle’s grand but suddenly ill-fated tunnel project began to look at each other. It was considered beyond belief that the “clunk” would come so soon into the actual digging — the result of literally decades of fierce debate and discussion on what to do with an elevated roadway considered a potential disaster waiting to happen at the slightest provocation.